Syria is pushing the 'Longest War' off radar

Washington hasn’t paid much attention to Afghanistan for a while, but with Syria now dominating the capital, its longest war seems to have slipped even further off the radar.

The White House’s full-court press on Syria has analysts wondering why the Obama administration hasn’t rallied a similar effort when it comes to Afghanistan, where 60,000 U.S. troops are still fighting.

Text Size

-

+

reset

“There’s a remarkable contrast between the energy with which the administration is now working the Congress on Syria and the notable lack of energy they’ve invested in building consensus for their Afghan policy. The latter matters more for U.S. interests — after all, we’re waging an actual war in Afghanistan already,” said Stephen Biddle, an expert on U.S. military and foreign policy at The George Washington University.

Afghanistan has long been “Obama’s war,” and yet lawmakers said last week that they hadn’t seen the White House exert as much energy as it has on Syria in years.

“I’ve never, frankly, seen a greater level of public engagement on an issue since the health care reform debate of 2009,” Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy said Tuesday at the Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Syria.

In Biddle’s mind, the White House hasn’t spent nearly as much political capital in lining up congressional backing for its Afghan policy or strategy.

The only way the Afghan security forces will be able to hold back the Taliban after U.S. troops leave is if Congress keeps footing the multibillion-dollar annual bills to sustain them, Biddle argued in an essay in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs.

“The war will thus become a contest in stamina between Congress and the Taliban,” he writes.

And yet the energy spent on Afghanistan pales in comparison to the recent effort being made to win support for Syria, Biddle told POLITICO. “Syria shows the scale of effort the White House is capable of, and may ultimately show the difference such efforts can make on national security policy. I wish they’d do the same for Afghanistan.”

But this lackadaisical approach toward Afghanistan can’t be blamed on Syria taking up all of Washington’s bandwidth — the lack of attention predates this latest crisis, said Anthony Cordesman, a military analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “But it does highlight that here we are focused on Syria when we are at war in Afghanistan, and we haven’t taken any critical decisions for over a year about what transition there means.”

It is still unknown how many U.S. troops will stay beyond 2014, what conditions are required if they are going to stay and what type of military and economic aid the United States plans to provide in the near and long term, he said.

Politicians ducking Afghanistan isn’t new. During last year’s presidential race, it rarely came up in debates, and it ranked toward the very bottom in terms of what voters were most concerned about. Outside the relevant congressional committees, fewer and fewer lawmakers and their staffs are engaged on Afghanistan, Cordesman said.

Washington think tanks are also moving away from the topic, and the U.S. Agency for International Development’s effort is also shrinking, Cordesman said.

At the Pentagon, at least, it still remains a top priority. That will be true even if a bombing campaign in Syria begins, Cordesman said: “They can walk and chew gum.”

On Wednesday, Afghanistan Deputy Commander Army Lt. Gen. Mark Milley briefed reporters at the Pentagon on the latest updates from the country.

“This is a very resilient enemy. I don’t think the Taliban is going to fade away into the dust, but I don’t think they have the capability to reseize political power over the next year,” Milley said.

When asked whether he thought the Taliban could be biding their time until U.S. forces leave in 2014, Milley said, “That’s in the realm of the possible, but I don’t think so.”

The Pentagon maintains that even with a defense strategy that emphasizes the Asia-Pacific region, it’s still prioritizing resources for Afghanistan. To keep war funding exempt from sequestration, the military services, especially the Army, had to cut deeper in some areas in order to protect resources for Afghanistan.

Still, there are small signs that within the Pentagon attention is being pulled in other directions.

Last Wednesday, for instance, in the Pentagon’s daily news roundup — the Early Bird — there were 16 articles on Syria vs. two on Afghanistan, one of which was about nuclear weapons in Pakistan.

But Afghanistan was not entirely absent from last week’s Senate hearing on Syria. For some lawmakers, the decision to go to war in Afghanistan is shaping their thinking as they consider whether and what kind of U.S. force to use in Syria.

Sen. Dick Durbin, who voted against the resolution to go to war in Iraq in 2002, said when he voted for the war in Afghanistan he thought it was the right thing to do and still does.

“But I didn’t know at the time that I voted for that authorization for the use of military force that I was voting for the longest war in the history of the United States and an authority to several presidents to do things that no one ever could have envisioned at that moment in history.”

With this in mind, Durbin said he wants the resolution on Syria to be as precise as possible so that it doesn’t leave open the possibility of years of war.